My Burkina Journal: Settling in

My flight out of Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris was relatively smooth, except for a 40 minute delay due to striking firemen, so that only two runways were functioning.

Yet it was from the freezer into the furnace. Fortunately the temperatures return to the reasonable range in the evenings at this time of year, although the heat seems a bit precocious for early February. I feel like I have been away for such a long time and, while some things seem so familiar, others are fuzzy. I find I am having to relearn the library software. . . In addition, much has happened over the past 11 months, so there are new challenges ahead as well.

For one, the person I had hoped would be my replacement has decided that she would like to go in a different direction career-wise, which means I will be training another slender, elegant Burkinabè woman, Martine Nana, mentioned in an earlier post. It will be a steep learning curve for her, and training her more difficult for me, because I won't be able to make any assumptions, and will be starting from scratch. SIL- Burkina Faso is going through some stormy financial waters and Martine is on loan to the library part-time as a compromise, since she already works at SIL as the receptionist, but is "under-utilized" for much of the time. Unfortunately, she has no experience with either the library or the academic department. In addition, I don't necessarily see her as possessing the variety of skills she really needs to be a librarian, certainly not yet, but she is meticulous, reliable and hard-working, and she asks good questions, so time will tell.

I've found a nice detailed explanation (17 pages of fine print) of the Dewey Decimal Classification in French and a glossary of specialized library terms which I have given her to study as "homework," and she has been introduced to SIL's Ethnologue which we use in the library for certain Dewey sub-classifications. For those unfamiliar with the Ethnologue, it is a catalog of some 7,479 languages spoken in 234 countries. Today Martine and I covered the intricacies of shelving books first decimally, and then alphabetically, given the idiosyncrasies of this collection, and practiced check-out and check-in using the online catalog. ResourceMate is sometimes a clunky library software but I am determined to make it work.

Here I am with Martine (left), and Bintu (right)

As for SIL's financial situation, more and more of the translation
work is being done by local translators, and money is just not there to support them as in the past. They have made some local structural changes in the organization, so it remains to be seen whether these will have an impact on the often uncertain funding. But with budget tightening, it also means that the plans to move the library will be put on a back burner, at least for the time being. This is very discouraging for me.

The Internet connection seems to be much more stable this year (although it has slowed down considerably today, as there is some kind of workshop going on at the Center.) I do, however, worry about my own laptop, which I discovered in the following rather unsettling state last night:

A hundred and twenty-five updates? Really? I'm not sure what the issue is because it is forever looking for updates that I'm sure are already installed. I have attempted to turn off the automatic update function for the time being because, as you can well imagine, I would be spending forever waiting for it to install these updates.